Box Delays Their IPO, While Dropbox Still Mulling Over It

Cloud computing, Big Data, mobility management, and collaboration are key priorities in enterprise IT trends these days. An IDC report estimates that by the year 2017, the number of mobile internet users will increase from 1.4 billion in 2013 to 2.3 billion. Within the cloud, Gartner estimates that enterprise spending will increase from $132 billion in 2013 to $244 billion by 2017. Another report from IDC estimates that the volume of data generated will increase 200 times over the period 2005 to 2020.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see services like Shutterfly going?

Matthew Dornquast: People who focus on everything will ultimately win over the specialization. There is always some new temporal period where a new format will get off, but then the large platforms absorb them.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to ask entrepreneurs to look at opportunities in the space that you really understand deeply, where would you ask them to focus? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the security budgets, security has always been an active area. Part of it is because there are all sorts of creative ways in which hackers tend to find ways to penetrate organizations. Also, there’s the constantly changing architectural issues. The whole cloud thing is relatively new. There is a constant flow of innovation that happens in security. As a result, the security office at large enterprises have to deal with a lot of different things all the time, and buy technologies from startups like yourself all the time. They’ve been quite comfortable doing that.

However, one thing that has always been true about the security purchase process is that there are priorities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another question on something that I asked you earlier about. Google has an incredible P&L. They have a business model that just throws out cash. They don’t want to pay that cash as taxes so they’re doing all sorts of things for the consumers and small business to benefit them. They certainly have the profitability and free cash flow to invest in enriching the feature sets and the functionality of their cloud drive offering.

There is a possibility that a lot of the low-end consumer and small business functionality requirements are going to be handled by Google just because of those dynamics. That puts some pressure on the players who actually have to make money to justify being in those businesses like yourself.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The enterprise that is a customer of Salesforce, when it decides to access Salesforce.com, would access it through the Adallom network.

Assaf Rappaport: Exactly. Bank of America or EMC who are using Salesforce, or Box, or whatever software applications they’re using; it’s their data that we are protecting. Of course, we are collaborating with SaaS providers in order to provide value to their customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 4)

Matthew Dornquast: That’s not enough. You have a database of consumers and you want to remind them that you have a business offering. You want to encourage them to participate in that. You need the connective tissue between your marketing systems and your enterprise sales force systems so that you will be able to recognize and measure the success rate of those efforts. There are other things that you can do. Enterprise sales force is armed with free consumer cards. When they talk to professionals they say, “Try us at home. It’s the same technology. If you like what you see, we have an enterprise dashboard for you that meet all your Chief Security Officer’s concerns.” It’s a great way to introduce them to a product in a frictionless way.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 2)

Assaf Rappaport:  Let’s take an example. I’m accessing the application from my home from an unmanaged device. So end point security is not going to be relevant. I could be accessing it through a public network, Internet café, or my own private network. All your perimeters, firewall, IDS, and other good stuff that you invested in to protect your on-premise and network are no longer relevant. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I can understand why Google is doing that, but as a private company that has to make money to survive and build business value, what is the justification of being in that business of offering something for free?

Matthew Dornquast: There’re a lot of benefits for the business if you know how to harness it and in particular when you accept the reality that as a business, you need to make your money elsewhere. We make our money on the business side of the equation, but the consumer side of our offering offers us a great deal of benefits. The obvious ones are brand awareness. It’s much easier to market and sell something that’s free, and to gain adoption on something that’s free. As long as you can build trusting, reliable, high-quality relationships with individuals, they facilitate the adoption of your enterprise product in the workplace. There’s a definite marketing advantage. >>>